I finished Going Bovine this morning, and just wanted to say: loved it. A very enjoyable read. It made me cry – I can count on one hand the number of books that have ever done THAT.

Those of you considering reading it, be warned, it contains sex and drugs and rock-and-roll, to say nothing of “language strong enough to knock a buzzard off a shit wagon” – as my old friend Carla once said.  Most of the bad reviews one sees are by people who were really really bothered by the language.  I apparently cuss more than I thought, because it barely even registered.

Then again, the kind of people who freak out about the naughty words are surely the same sorts of people who like snowglobes.  And if that comment makes no sense to you, well, read the book.  It will.

The one thing that kind of irked me – and I admit I’m picking nits here – is that there would occasionally be very subtle and clever literary allusions, and I’d think to myself, “Ha!  Caught that!”  And then she’d flesh them out and make them more explicit – for the kids, see – and a little bit of the wonder was lost for me.

But.  There was still plenty to go around.

(Below the fold, a discussion of the ending, probably not quite free from spoilers.)

read more from "Best book I’ve read in a long time."

Momma drags me to the door
It’s a real downpour
Got my feet braced on the floor
But I know that I’m gonna be
A wet one
Ooh yeah I’m a wet one

Gotta keep my legs stiff
Just as stiff as I can get
But it ain’t no use
I’m a real wet pet

Gonna whine all night
Gonna whimper, I’m a fright
Gonna shake my furry hide
Just as soon as I’m inside
Cuz I’m a wet one
Ooh yeah I’m a wet one

Oh I’m wet, wet, wet
No, I won’t go out again
And I won’t let you forget
I’m a real wet pet

* It’s the last week before school starts, and we’re busy here.  Busy reading and playing and riding the bike, that is.  You can do worse than be busy like us.

* We managed to make it out to our annual Canadians baseball game yesterday.  I believe this is the first time we’ve made it all the way to the end of the game.  Previous years there were rain delays, pushing it past Byron’s bedtime, and then last year the kid behind us fell into our laps and knocked over our popcorn, resulting in Byron’s refusal to stay one minute more.  But yesterday was good.  The Canadians beat the volcanoes handily, and tasty snacks were had by all, including Byron’s first rootbeer float.

* Today he informed me: “Mom, I’m getting to be such a big boy now, I think I should be drinking more grown-up drinks.  Like root beer.”

* Dream on, sweetie.

* I’ve got a couple books from the library that I’m excited about: “Going Bovine” by Libba Bray and “Incarceron” by Catherine Fisher.  I’m also halfway through Jonathan Stroud’s “Heroes of the Valley”.  I am particularly excited about Going Bovine.  I’d heard great things about it, but was really only mildly interested until I chanced recently to hear that it’s based on Don Quixote.

* Um, geez, people!  You coulda told me that sooner!  I would’ve been on it like a mosquito!

* Each of these books is 400+ pages, making me wonder whether I’m actually going to get them all read before they’re due back at the library.  I believe we can thank Harry Potter for this newfound prolixity among YA writers.

* My editor has not yet given me notes, but has indicated that he wants me to add a bunch of stuff from the previous version.  This may well inflate it to 400 pages.  My knee jerk reaction was extreme irritation, but subsequent communications are leading me to conclude that this isn’t so much a rewrite as an addition of material I’ve already written.  Icing on the cake, as it were.  Big sugar roses, or better yet, icing carrots, being ridden by naked babies.  Yeah.  That’s the stuff.

There are “Book Trailers”?  On YouTube?  Whose genius idea was THAT?

I’ve been perusing them, since learning they exist, and am lightly horrified.  They’re… er.  Let’s just say they vary in quality.  That’s a fair thing to say.

Do people watch them?  Have they, in fact, generated a single sale for anyone?  Will I be expected to generate something like this, or – worse yet – submit to someone else doing one for me?

Why yes, I am writing a book.  I know, you forgot.  Sometimes I forget, too, or I try to.  In principle, I may be writing some more again soon.  I believe my experience, the last several months, can be summed up nicely by the title of this post.

Every since our mercury thermometer incident, Byron can’t get enough chemistry.  We started out looking at videos of people playing with mercury on YouTube, but that soon progressed to videos of people tossing sodium into big vats of water.

Good fun!  I was just pleased that I remembered enough from chemistry class to know what kind of excitement to look for.

Anyway, our quest has finally led us to the ultimate in YouTube Chemistry: The Periodic Table of Videos.  They boast of having a video about every single element; we haven’t gone through all of them, so I can’t verify that.  But in addition to the elements, there are a lot of videos of liquids changing colours, things glowing and exploding, fumes and loud noises, and chemists having a grand old time.

Byron loves it.  But you already guessed that.

If you’re looking for an enclosed dog park, there’s a new one downtown: Emery Barnes Park, at Davie and Richards.  My friend Arwen clued me in that this existed, but then I had trouble confirming online that the park was a) completed, and b) had an actual enclosure for off-leash dogs.  The answers are yes, and yes, and it’s a very nice park!

(“You could just, y’know, take my word for it, biznitch!” says Arwen.  Yeth, mathter.  But this post is really for other people in Vancouver who are looking for an enclosed dog-run and can’t find accurate information on this one.  The Vancouver Park Board page, for example, doesn’t say the area is gated.)

The dog enclosure is at the north end of the park.  It’s brand-spankin’ new, only been open a month.  It’s shaded by buildings, certain times of day, but the trees aren’t quite big enough to do much good yet.  There are 3-4 benches.  There’s a drinking fountain inside the enclosure, including one at dog-level, which Una just adored.  It’s not as big as the one at Nelson Park – maybe a third of the size – but there are advantages to that as well as disadvantages.  There’s not as much space to run, but for us that also translates to not as much space to run AWAY to when it’s time to go home.

The playground, Byron reports, is off-scale awesome.  I let him play while I watched the dog.  There are a few pines creating line-of-sight issues with the playground, so that might not be comfortable for everyone.  There’s also a big fountain system, which is probably really cool when it’s going.  Somebody had dumped detergent in it, and so this morning it was off while city workers tried to get rid of piles of suds as tall as Byron.

As always, downtown, there were some slightly spooky people, but they were vastly outnumbered by the non-spooky, including lots and lots of children.  That plus the whole thing being so clean and new gave a feeling of reasonable safety.  There was lots of meter parking around the perimeter.  People were letting small dogs off-leash on the lawn; it was like a Chihuahua fiesta.  At one point there were more dogs on the lawn than in the enclosure, and Una was whining to go out there.

And that’s our report!

The blackberry pie I made for Scott’s homecoming was, I think, exceptionally good.  I think fresh berries do make a bit of difference, not that we have any choice about freezing them if we want pie all year round.  Which we do.

We’ve got seven pies’ worth of berries.  I hope to get a few more, before the season’s up, and then Scott will calculate the Pie Interval, and mark the calendar.

I’ve made so many pies – with Scott’s help, more often than not – that it’s really not a daunting task any more.  It’s something you do over the course of a day, like laundry, or in an evening, like watching TV.  We make the pies with Splenda now, which doesn’t change the carb count as much as one might think, and we’ve perfected the amount of tapioca needed for blackberries (which are very juicy and need more than the recipe book says).

I didn’t realize tapioca and cassava and manioc were the all same thing – well, the way corn starch and hominy and popcorn are the same thing, I guess – until I looked it up recently in response to a Dire Tapioca Spill.  I knocked the box off the shelf and into Scott’s iced tea machine.  Oops.  Luckily, the machine hadn’t been used in a week, due to Scott’s being in Japan, and the inside was dry, otherwise we’d probably still be shoveling goop out of it.  Tapioca expands quite a lot when wet.

I also made a cobbler, with blackberries, cherries, and nectarines, which was quite excellent.  Byron and I tore through that pretty quickly, polishing off the last of it at lunch today.

Gotta admit, summer fruit is the best.  Not as keen on the long dark days of apples, oranges, and bananas, but it’s nearly dark now in the evenings when I take out the trash, and I know that time is coming back.  Maybe I should freeze some blueberries too.

Byron had been asking to go to Playland, and since he doesn’t really like the Fair part of the whole PNE experience anyway, I figured we’d go this week and beat the 100th anniversary Fair crowds.

I’m trying to find it humorous that he begged and begged to go, and then once we were there decided he didn’t like any of the rides.  Um, buddy, unless we want to spend a fortune on carnival games, there isn’t really anything else to do there, when the Fair isn’t on.  Well, ok, yes, we can eat cotton candy.  But other than THAT.

He likes the rides that aren’t rides, the fun-houses and slides.  The elephants and helicopters were “too young” and almost everything else was “too scary”.  He was willing to do the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel (although he needed great persuasion to go on the wheel the first time).  He tried the small roller-coaster as our very last ride of the day, and although he laughed and seemed mostly to enjoy it, the picture they took of us going down the big slope has me grinning and Byron with his head buried in my lap.

As a 4-year-old he loved the Scrambler.  Now you could not pay him money to get on that thing.

I thought the bumper cars would be okay, but he got put in a car that wouldn’t go, and got so upset he took off his seatbelt and tried to get out, which of course necessitated the ride be turned off – to the great joy of all the other patrons, as you can imagine.

But on the way home?  Constant chatter about how great it was, along with this peculiar gem: “Mom, did you ever notice how nearby things seem to be moving faster than far-away things, when you’re on a ride or in the car?”

I don’t know why that tickled me as much as it did.  Apparently I needed a laugh at that point.

* Whew!  Summer’s finally over!  It didn’t break 70F today!

* After all my complaining, you’d think I would have been happy, but no, I spent a distressingly large portion of the day fussing that I was cold.  Clearly, there’s no pleasing me.

* Una, who never barks, barked a blue streak at the window washers today.  Apparently the courtyard window is HERS, and that soggy sponge-on-a-stick?  Pure, unadulterated evil.  I crated her and she finally stopped, but I do believe she uttered more individual woofs today than she has uttered total in all the time we’ve had her.

* We all know Facepalm, right?  Yeah, well, Byron has started doing that.  Spontaneously.  In response to me.  Apparently I dismay him.

* Today he drew some pretty spectacular Bone fan art.  First he had to pitch a mini-fit, wherein he bewailed the fact that he can’t draw the Bones properly (and where, in response to my suggesting that maybe it’s okay not to be perfect, I was treated to a massive **FACEPALM!**).  Fine, I said, then don’t draw the Bones.

I won’t, he said.

Fine, I said, DON’T.

And then he did, and they were awesome.

* Fone Bone’s hat is flying off in the breeze and Smiley, always the crazier of the two, has no less than FIVE hats flying off his head in high dramatic fashion.  And there are stick-figures in the drawing too, but it’s fine because they are pole-vaulting and tumbling and being shot out of cannons.  Everyone’s in a hurry to rescue Thorn, who is just off-page, cursing up a storm.  It is a deeply wonderful picture.

* Yeah, yeah, I’ll scan it.  Sometime.  Your wish is my delayed command.

* You: **FACEPALM!**

… was for Byron to learn how to swim.  It’s going less swimmingly than the biking, alas, but I’m trying to just stay relaxed about it.  My theory is that someday, he’s just going to decide that oh, putting your head under the water isn’t really the life-threatening horror he once thought, and that upon realizing he can do it, he will then progress rapidly to swimming fluency.

That’s how I did it, after all.  Age 8, light dawned on marble head.  Within a very short time, I was quite good.

Of course, we lived somewhere with a pool that year, so my job with B, as I see it, is regular exposure.

Third goal: sign him up for karate.  Would have done it sooner, but we’ve been gone just enough this summer that it didn’t seem an optimal time to start.  I’m looking at September, I think.

September, which is a mere two weeks away.  The eternal paradox of summer: how it drags on and zips past, simultaneously.